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Martian Naming Madness
Macblaster writes "With the rise of robotic exploration of Mars, scientists are having difficulty naming all the new features they're discovering. Accepted name lists have fallen by the wayside, and now scientifically important features are named after everything from 80's bands to romantic interests." From the article: "Like European explorers who named the New World after their homes in the Old, the Mars scientists have filled the strange landscape of the Red Planet with a mishmash of modern life on Earth. The twin rover missions have forced scientists to come up with more than 4,000 names to mark everything from the majestic Columbia Hills to a few pebbles in the sand. The result is an extravagantly labeled map punctuated by the scientists' ever-changing preoccupations with history, holidays, monkeys, ice cream, cartoon characters, sushi, Mayan words, Scandinavian fish delicacies ... the list goes on and on."
But seriously, how likely are these to be used (retained for use) anyway ? Or haven't you heard of a planet named George ? http://encarta.msn.com/related_761564250_14/planet _originally_named_in_honor_of_George_III.html
How long before someone is selling the rights to name a rock on ebay? NASA could probably raise the money for a mars mission within a year if they did that!
Given how prone to these huge sandstorms Mars is, how many of these named features will still even exist in six months, or six years?
Names are a cultural phenomenon. People feel very strongly about names. E.g. some countries have lists of names, you must name your kid from the list (unless you are a foreigner -- then they usually let you off the hook).
Whites in American tend to have a set of names (large) that they pick from. They tend not to pick names at random (which is what this article is about). But poor whites will choose non-standard spellings for normal names.
Try to see what your own attitudes are to names, with this simple test:
There are some black NFL players with non-standard names. Here are 10 unique ones:
Laveranues
Na'il
Jerametrius
J'Vonne
Kenyatta
Dontarrious
Plaxico
LaDainian
Shirdonya
Keyaron
If you read that list of names and felt like laughing, you are probably not black, and you are probably offended that rocks on Mars are getting silly names.
On the other hand, if you don't care about those names and how non-standard they are, I bet you don't care what the rocks on Mars get called either.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
Yea, I know it's hard to come up with 4000 names, but look at this picture.
It almost looks like some highschool kid didn't know his geography and just made up names to be funny...
What about these mystical sounding names, which require (mostly Latin) study to actually 'get'?
These names seem more like graffiti or like a dog marking each corner for his new territory.
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
There is not unprecedented. There are around 6000 naked eye stars (total for both hemispheres under good seeing conditions with no light polution). No problems with naming the major ones and giving the others designations by constellation or according to one of many catalogues. (Only insanity here is there's a huge overlap between catalogs so one star can have many names).
There is incredible diversity in the number of species on Earth and again that's been no problem for science. (Okay the Latin is archaic now but it had its merits when the system was conceived).
The problem is that scientists are forgetting to be scientific and use their basic scientific tools - classification being one of the most powerful. Trouble is no scientist or NASA spokesperson wants to tell the public about his exciting discovery on rock NW2345, when it could be called Van Halen or some other name that would capture public imagination.
This is similar to the problems caused by coders who name their variables inane things from swearwords to girls names that have nothing to do with their purpose.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
They should auction off naming rights for a few objects to the general public.
Put the funds towards an engineering scholarship for some kid who wants to work on the next mission.
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This always reminds me of the origins of "Canada". From http://www.pch.gc.ca/progs/cpsc-ccsp/sc-cs/o5_e.cf m :
In 1535, two Indian Youths told Jacques Cartier about the route to "kanata." They were referring to the village of Stadacona; "kanata" was simply the Huron-Iroquois word for "village" or "settlement." But for want of another name, Cartier used "Canada" to refer not only to Stadacona (the site of present day Quebec City), but also to the entire area subject to its chief, Donnacona.
The first use of "Canada" as an official name came in 1791 when the Province of Quebec was divided into the colonies of Upper and Lower Canada. In 1841, the two Canadas were again united under one name, the Province of Canada. At the time of Confederation, the new country assumed the name of Canada.
"We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different!" -- Kurt Vonnegut
Assuming the names did stick, the future inhabitants would probably have no clue who Bon Jovi is... much less that the name has significance outside the context of the crater they live in... they probably wouldn't know if its namesake is a who, a what, or a where... try asking the average 12 year old if he's familiar with the Rat Pack, I dare say his answer won't even remotely involve Frank Sinatra
I can understand wanting to name significant places but naming pebbles has always been a bit much to me, more of a PR vehicle and maybe a bit of geek fun at JPL. Perhaps there is a bit of cultural imperialism too? Grid coordinates are fine for scientific observations.
Anyway, as soon as people live there they will probably use their own names (hopefully most of the planet will be as yet unnamed).
What I would like to suggest is that some time be put into creating a mnemonic system that would be of use to travelers or anybody else who needs to navigate the surface. Or for that matter, to allow people to talk about locations on the planet without having to contact an online database every time someone mentions a new geographical name.
There are lots of ways it could be done. For example if you pick a sequence of one or two syllable sounds to indicate moving east from 0 degrees longitude, and a similar encoding for latitude, you could easily create a name for a place that sounds and means something.
Or by tacking one such standardized sequence to the end of an existing name perhaps with the first syllable indicating compass direction (say for a route a robot takes) you could specify by name points along the route. A given sequence would have a given resolution (say 10 meters for tiny robots).
And you could have alternate homonyms for each syllable so that it is easy to say a given sequence in some language (really the sequence should be chosen so that it is easy to say in all major languages).
Also the same naming system could be used for ANY planet or for that matter, any mountain or terrestrial orienteering / geographical application. This way you could in fact practice and use a system on Earth that will serve you in good stead on Mars.
If a similar system was developed based not on geographical coordinates but to measure for instance time, temperature, depth, or even spacecraft motion or orbits, it could tie in to the above system and provide an extremely useful way to talk about land, water, and space phenomena in a unified fashion, with arbitrary precision and universal applicability, while being culture agnostic, and in particular human-centered. Using computers for so many things we tend to get stuck with too much information and make silly mistakes like whether to use Fahrenheit or Celsius. These things can kill you in space or for that matter in the ocean depths. By saying human-centered, I mean that a human can always be able to talk about a location if he or she knows such a universal naming system, and it uses the brain more efficiently. We have trouble remembering numerical strings but can relatively easily remember poetry, songs, famous quotations, where we put things in our homes, routes to get to the office, and so on.
I believe it would be a good idea to develop such a system to be eventually taught to every school child, possibly with a limited set of nouns and verbs culled from different languages, so that every person in the world can talk rationally to each other about the basics of location, time, motion, route, and so on. It also could give rise to a basic way for any person in the world to add to a universally useable database of local travel directions or a minimal language that can be used by both humans and computers.
This system would limit the unnecessary, frivolous naming being done and would allow random locations to be specified in terms of their context (from a well-known named landmark), so every major Mars landmark should have a single precise point at which it is based so that you could indicate a route from there.
You could build mnemonic strings in your head to remember a certain location, and you can build songs that help you get there. Children and adults can share in talking about features of Mars, and humans can intuitively check the coordinates used by computers as well as using speech input and sound output to talk about coordinates.
I'm probably not the first to think of this sort of
Lets see how long that sticks once there are people there defending the territory with weapons.
The policy of the United States is worse than bad---it is insane. -- Ludwig von Mises, Economic Policy(1959)
We also name particular spots on rocks (or soil) for the same kind of reason. "Patrick," the spot on Spongebob referenced in the article, was a target we explored with the IDD, and we always name those to help ensure that we're putting the IDD where the scientists want it. This is even more crucial when, for instance, we're investigating two or more targets on the same feature and the order is important. Being able to say something like "we want to look at Frodo, then Bilbo, then Gollum" helps us get it right.
A further reason names are important: morale. Coming up with cool and creative namespaces adds to the fun of the mission, both for us and, we hope, for you. (The first thing I got to name was a boundary line between two layers of soil, which we discovered after a trenching operation. I called it "Mason-Dixon.") And we often choose names that are related to what's going on at the time -- for example, Spirit has now climbed to the top of Husband Hill, and the locations there are being named after famous (and dead) mountain climbers.
However, it was drilled into us from the very start that any names we came up with would be nicknames only, and that only the IAU got to choose official names. When talking to the press, we're very careful to use terms such as "nickname" to try to make it clear we're not overstepping our bounds. Personally, I think we should never have violated the restriction on naming things after personal connections such as pets and spouses; that's really poor practice, but at least we've done it on only a couple of occasions. If I recall the story correctly, the guy who named the target after his wife was in the doghouse for having to work on Valentine's Day, so I can at least understand that if not excuse it. :-)
Incidentally, about Spongebob. Project management didn't want us using that name -- I think they were a little embarrassed or something, so they renamed it "Heatshield Rock" (since we found it next to Opportunity's heat shield). But the rover drivers had other ideas -- we kept calling it "Spongebob" (or sometimes "Spongerock") when we weren't talking to the press. I think we won. :-)
Those of you interested in this topic might also be interested in an earlier post, How Endurance Crater Got Its Name, which I think gives some insight into the (nick)naming process. A particularly relevant quote from that post:
``Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators.'' -- Richard Dawkins
This sounds sort of like when Carl Sagan got offended at an internal Apple computer codenamed "Carl Sagan" and sued; they simply gave it the new codename BHA, for "Butthead Astronomer."